AFTER THE DELUGE: CLEANUP CONTINUES : Rotten Luck for Berry Farmers : Promising crops come a cropper from weeks of rain. The county’s second-ranking agricultural product will be even scarcer than usual for a while.

The soggy new year has not begun well for Irvine Ranch strawberry farmer A.G. Kawamura.

Just a month ago, Kawamura was off to a head start in the county’s competitive strawberry market with an early crop on his 650-acre farm along the San Diego Freeway. But more than 11 inches of torrential January rain doused those expectations, leaving him with piles of rotting fruit rather than a jump on his fellow growers.

“This is one of the humbling things about being a farmer,” the 36-year-old Kawamura, whose family has farmed the Irvine Ranch for 35 years, said Wednesday. “You can do everything perfectly, and then the gods can render those efforts futile.”

This unusually wet January is a temporary setback for the state’s strawberry growers, who are responsible for 75% of the nation’s strawberry production. It is Orange County’s second-ranking crop, earning $44 million in 1991, the last year for which figures are available. The top crop is nursery stock and cut flowers, which fetched $141 million at market.

While most Orange County crops escaped major damage, farm experts say it was the strawberry that bore the brunt of the storms. Unlike Valencia oranges, whose tough skins protect them from downpours, and crops like lettuce, which can soak up the rainfall, the more fragile strawberry fruit cannot weather the heavy moisture, Kawamura said.

“The analogy is putting your hand in a bathtub for five days straight and then pulling it out,” Kawamura said. “What’s it look like? You start seeing decay, rot, the whole realm of things.”

Kawamura could not estimate the financial loss local farmers have suffered, but he figures it goes beyond the direct damage to strawberries.

“What people don’t realize is that this impacts people all down the line,” he said. “It impacts all the families of the workers, the truck drivers who do the shipping, the facilities that cool the strawberries, an entire work force.”

But Kawamura and other agricultural experts see brighter days ahead. They predict the same water-logged strawberry plants will grow new fruit by spring and that consumers won’t face higher prices at the market.

“The immediate effect of the rain is that the fruit which is either ripe or close to harvest is lost, but the plants themselves are unaffected,” said John Ellis, the county’s deputy agricultural commissioner. “They will come through the rain, get treated with fungicides, push new flowers and have another pick.”

Shoppers, who aren’t used to seeing large quantities of strawberries on the grocery shelves this early in the year, will see even fewer than usual, the experts say.

“As far as the consumer is concerned, this is the time of year when strawberries are rare anyway,” said Dave Riggs, a spokesman for the Watsonville-based California Strawberry Advisory Board. “It’s not unusual to see strawberry prices at $2 a pint right now in the early season. By spring, the prices should be down to between 69 to 89 cents a basket, which is the average retail price.”

Much of the early strawberry crop is shipped overseas anyway, where growers can fetch the top dollars, Ellis said. Given the volatility of the weather during the January and February months, many growers time their production to have the fruit come later in the season, he said.

The trade-off, however, is more competition in the market.

“Lots of farmers do both: plant for the early market and hope the weather holds and plant for the later market when all the fruit is coming in at the same time,” Ellis said.

Along with some late-market strawberries, growers like San Juan Capistrano farmer Shig Kinoshita planted lettuce. The lettuce and his 15 acres of celery did well through the storms, Kinoshita said.

“It was so cold and dry before the storms that the rain, and the tropical weather it brought with it, caused my lettuce to take off,” Kinoshita said.

Like lettuce, Valencia oranges generally enjoy the rainfall, said citrus farmer Billy Bathgate, who has run his family’s 75-acre San Juan Capistrano ranch since 1953.

“The rain is basically beneficial,” Bathgate said. “The rain generally leaches the soil of the accumulated salts from irrigation and replenishes the deep moisture that has been depleted over the years. There can be a problem with rot if the mud splashes up on the skin, but it is the navel oranges that are much more susceptible to rot.”